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The collapsing house on Park Hill Drive carries reminders of a once-thriving home. Since the city acquired the property in 2017, it's become a safety hazard for the owner next door.
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City’s long delays leave rotting homes in Pittsburgh’s most distressed neighborhoods

Courtesy of Kendall Pelling, Rising Tide Partners

City’s long delays leave rotting homes in Pittsburgh’s most distressed neighborhoods

For the city of Pittsburgh, it was a crucial opportunity to move dozens of abandoned and decrepit homes under its ownership to a nonprofit that planned to restore them after years of neglect.

There was a shuttered house with a collapsed porch on Broad Street, a hulking shell that sat vacant for years. And a condemned, boarded-up home with shattered windows near a kids’ playground in Hazelwood.

Then came the delays by city officials.

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Even when the roof collapsed on one of the houses, sending debris hurtling onto a private home next door, Rising Tide Partners could not get the city to close the deal on more than 30 deteriorating properties.

State Sen. Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, along with state Rep. Sara Innamorato, left, during a news conference Thursday in Bloomfield, where they unveiled legislation that would let Pittsburgh enact a tax relief program for longtime homeowners in gentrifying areas.
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Three years later, the nonprofit is still waiting.

“It’s a slow train wreck,” said Kendall Pelling, executive director of the group. “We’re just watching good homes rot away before our very eyes.”

For years, housing advocates have approached the city with offers to buy up crumbling, vacant homes and either tear them down or put up new ones, but they are often left with little response or dragged into a labyrinth of red tape that can last years.

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At a time when the city is losing critically needed tax revenue, the lack of a program to turn around properties and get them back on the tax rolls remains one of the most striking examples of what's gone wrong with the city's housing program and why so many properties continue to languish in areas from Hazelwood to East Hills, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation has found.

The city has taken ownership of nearly 5,000 properties — mostly over unpaid taxes and liens — with one in every five carrying code or health violations.

While neighboring cities have launched effective land banks and other programs to turn their properties over to private owners, Pittsburgh has accumulated nearly 900 structures and lots in the past four years and off-loaded fewer than 150 to private owners since 2020, data shows.

Mr. Pelling said Rising Tide keeps waiting to take ownership of more than 30 decaying properties, but the ordeal has been “maddening.”

The property located at 5466 Broad Street on Sunday, March 12, 2023. The string of abandoned properties along Broad Street offers a snapshot of the city's portfolio of decaying homes.
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“The day of reckoning has to come,” he said.

Dangerous dwellings

For Rick Swartz, executive director of the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, it took his group five years to finally take over 16 houses and lots from the city in a long and frustrating process that began in 2017 — at times, almost causing the nonprofit to walk away.

Local officials had agreed to sell the lots and abandoned homes, pending approval from City Council and successful efforts to clear the titles, so that the group could spruce up the homes or build new ones. Not until last year did the final sale take place.

In the time between Mr. Swartz’s initial proposal and the closings, one of the houses fell into disrepair and was condemned with a “loose and rotting wall.” Over the next two years, inspectors deemed the home an “unsafe structure” — five separate times.

The rest of the group's targeted parcels racked up more than four dozen violations in the same timespan — including conditions that were unfit for human habitation — before the city finally transferred ownership. One house became a dump for old tires and later, a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Image DescriptionRick Swartz, executive director of the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, says it was a long ordeal for his group to take over 16 houses and lots from the city of Pittsburgh — five years in the making. The final sale took place last year.(John Colombo/For the Post-Gazette)

Many cities have tackled the problems of older homes that carry a litany of liens and other encumbrances. One of the most common solutions: land banks empowered to cut through red tape and forge alliances with taxing authorities.

In the case of Pittsburgh, a land bank created for this very reason has failed to acquire more than one barren lot in nine years — despite hundreds of thousands spent on consultants and other costs. And the city government has yet to pass critical legislation that could speed up the process of turning over houses, records show.

The city’s inability to cut through the current maze that includes an application, a treasurer’s sale, title clearing, and eventually approval from City Council can delay the transfer of a single property by upwards of five years — if it succeeds at all, advocates say.

“I don’t see that as a workable system,” said Frank Ford, a policy advisor at the Fair Housing Center in Cleveland.

In his city, the process can take a year to 18 months, and at another land bank in Allegheny County – the Tri-COG – it’s the same length of time.

Pittsburgh’s delays in turning over most of its real estate have directly contributed to a backlog of dilapidated homes — some dating back to the 1960s — and generated widespread complaints from local residents for decades.

Last year, as local governments received an unprecedented windfall of stimulus money amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Pittsburgh earmarked $7 million for the land bank, hoping that it would turn hundreds of homes and lots in the coming years.

But the core problem remains: No one has established a legal procedure to transfer abandoned structures from city ownership to the land bank, imperiling the federal funds, which must be obligated by the end of next year, or they will expire.

Legislation was filed last May to establish a process, but it remains stalled in City Council, records show. Councilwoman Deb Gross has still not scheduled a hearing, which could lead to a vote. Ms. Gross did not respond to repeated interview requests.

In the absence of a land bank, community groups have tried to rein in the city’s wasteland of unsafe homes. Even against the backdrop of dangerous dwellings, few have succeeded.

Hunks of concrete

“With vacant, city-owned lots, one can afford to be patient,” Mr. Swartz said. “But with houses, the sense of urgency begins to grow with every year that the house remains vacant.”

In the past three years, no other community development corporation has acquired more than six city properties, records show.

For everyday citizens, the process is even more daunting.

Image DescriptionRising Tide Partners has tried for years to buy the deteriorating home on Park Hill Drive. As delays mount from city officials, the roof has collapsed, spraying debris onto the house next door. (Courtesy of Kendall Pelling, Rising Tide Partners)

The city's abandoned house next to Joyce Parr’s carries reminders of a once-thriving home: shelves of books line the walls; an ‘80s-era TV sits off to the side; trinkets poke out from under a thick layer of debris.

As years passed, the single family house in East Hills succumbed to the elements. A highchair that once held a baby now seats a hunk of concrete that fell when the roof caved in. Ever since the city acquired the house in 2017, it has become an unwelcome neighbor for Ms. Parr — and a safety hazard.

When the ceiling collapsed, water began seeping into her house, leaving mold and blistering on the walls. She said she’s had to cut down falling gutters. At one point, her family couldn’t open their windows because raccoons perched on the windowsill — they were nesting in the house next door.

“It’s been a real nightmare.” said Ms. Parr, who has tried to buy the house to stem the ever-worsening damage. But when she contacted the city, she said local officials “just laughed.”

“The neighborhood has gone to the dogs,” she said. “I would never buy another property.”

In 2020, city inspectors labeled the house unfit for human occupancy, and specifically noted that “parts of the property are falling off onto the neighbor’s.” To this day, the city hasn’t fixed a single problem.

Mr. Pelling from Rising Tide Partners has also tried to acquire the property for years, with little success. Sensing urgency, Rising Tide filed a license request with the city last year to repair the collapsing roof, but the city never responded, records and interviews show.

“We gave up on city real estate because we have never seen any track record of them moving issues along,” Mr. Pelling said. When Rising Tide first eyed the property three years ago, it assessed repair costs at about $100,000, Mr. Pelling said, adding that the costs have since tripled.

Mayor Ed Gainey, who campaigned for office two years ago on a pledge of addressing the needs of older neighborhoods, did not respond to interview requests.

Pittsburgh is among many rust belt cities that hemorrhaged population after signature industries shut down. But the city’s struggle to recycle abandoned properties has set it apart from many other urban areas.

In Genesee County, Michigan — a county slightly larger than Pittsburgh in population — the local land bank sold more than 700 vacant lots and homes in the last fiscal year.

The land bank in Cuyahoga County, which envelopes Cleveland — an area ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis — has acquired more than 10,000 properties in the past decade and transferred about 2,000 to developers and community groups.

Mr. Ford, a lawyer and urban housing expert in Cleveland, said the local land bank has helped significantly to pull the city out of the foreclosure quagmire. If Cleveland regressed to Pittsburgh’s process, “we would have thousands of distressed properties that would still be sitting there undermining housing values, equity for homeowners [and] creating unhealthy conditions.”

Even within Allegheny county, the Tri-COG Land Bank — encompassing over 25 municipalities east of Pittsburgh — is closing in on its hundredth property acquisition. Tri-COG launched in 2017, three years after the Pittsburgh land bank was created.

In all, Pittsburgh has paid a steep price: A report by the Center for Community Progress showed the city loses more than $2 million in property taxes every year on vacant properties. The blight torpedoes housing values more broadly as well.

According to a study by Tri-COG Land Bank, properties within 150 feet of a vacant structure can lose more than 15% of their value, entrenching home owners in a cycle of loss. About a quarter of dwellings in Allegheny County fit into that category.

“We compare it to cancer,” said An Lewis, executive director of the Tri-COG. “If you don't address blighted properties, like cancer, they will grow.”

Tremendous blight

In recent years, Homewood has become the center of Pittsburgh’s housing woes, with the city controlling more than 800 properties — about one in four slapped with code and health violations.

The blight is “tremendous,” said Jerome Jackson, director of Operation Better Block. “It's on the main streets, it's on the back streets; it’s thriving.”

Jackson’s organization is part of the Homewood Community Development Collaborative, a group of nine nonprofits working to bring change to the neighborhood. He and others in the area say they’ve tried for years to acquire city properties, but “nothing’s happening.”

“There is a deep-rooted assumption that blighted neighborhoods are not good investments,” said Pelling. “The structure of the system is predicated on the assumption that these neighborhoods are not valuable.”

In the absence of a land bank and other housing reforms, several community groups have turned to a new option: conservatorships. They say the Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act sponsored by a former state lawmaker from Allegheny County allows them to take over homes and lots the city has acquired and find people willing to fix them up.

The groups, which include Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation and Rising Tide Partners, have mounted a legal challenge to target at least 75 city-owned homes and lots. A successful outcome would shave years off the legal process otherwise needed to buy the properties.

“If you think of a problem as urgent, you have to structure it as urgent,” Mr. Pelling said.

During a Feb. 9 hearing, Judge John McVay Jr. heard arguments from both sides and is expected to rule on whether the case can move forward in the coming weeks.

As the years wear on without any proven solutions, property owners like Ms. Parr worry that the system will remain broken.

“To let these properties sit and deteriorate when somebody could be living [there] or they could have been even put back on your tax rolls,” said Ms. Parr. “It’s a disgrace.”

Post-Gazette Data Reporter Michael Korsh contributed to this report.

Neena Hagen: nhagen@post-gazette.com

First Published: March 10, 2023, 12:47 p.m.

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The collapsing house on Park Hill Drive carries reminders of a once-thriving home. Since the city acquired the property in 2017, it's become a safety hazard for the owner next door.  (Courtesy of Kendall Pelling, Rising Tide Partners)
Courtesy of Kendall Pelling, Rising Tide Partners
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